Linux Top 3: Fedora 18 Delayed, Tiny Core Advances and a Shot in the ARM

Linux Top 3: Fedora 18 Delayed, Tiny Core Advances and a Shot in the ARM

November 5, 2012

1) Fedora 18

There are some Linux distributions that hold steadfast to their release schedules no matter what. That's not the case with Fedora, which is aiming for quality and stability and will often delay a release and its milestone components for that reason.

Fedora developers decided to push back the Fedora 18 beta release by at week during a go/no go meeting on Thursday November 1st. The decision to delay the beta release was due to a number of blocker bugs as well as issues with the upgrade tool.

The anaconda installation tool currently has 7 blocker bugs listed for it that will need to be addressed for the release to go forward.

Even though developers have pushed back the beta milestone, the plan is to still release the final version of Fedora 18 on December 11th. The original release planfor Fedora 18 had at one point planned a release as early as November 6th.

2) Tiny Core 4.7

The same day that Fedora developers pushed back their Beta milestone, TinyCore Linux developer Robert Shingledecker released Tiny Core Linux 4.7.

Tiny Core is a minimalist Linux distribution, similar to Puppy Linux in size and scope.

"The major theme for Core v4.7 is major improvements to "core" GUI programs," the project page states. "New in this release is a major overhaul to the ondemand system in support of scm ondemand menu and icons. The Backup/Restore GUI, filetool, located on the Control Panel, has been expanded to easily add or delete files and directories, as well as options to display the backup process. Using ondemand and eliminating unneeded onboot items results in faster boot times. "

3) Linux on ARM

Efforts to expand Linux on ARM based architecture were expanded last week with the formation of the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG).

Members of the LEG include: AMD, Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, Calxeda, Canonical, Cavium, Facebook, HP, Marvell and Red Hat. A key goal for the group is to work on accelerating the development of Linux Servers on ARM.

Linux is driving innovation in every area of computing from mobile and embedded to the cloud. Linaro’s enterprise efforts will bring together software engineers to help accelerate Linux development for ARM servers, and we’re confident that this new server-focused group will advance Linux in these areas and offer additional choices to Linux users around the world.” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.